A Wisdom Wednesday Episode. On Wisdom Wednesday I bring wisdom from the best events, books, articles, videos etc. and share the highlights with you!

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Telligent: A leader in community software for digital marketing and support communities. Its social software solutions help bring together modern collaboration technologies into a single integrated suite that includes social applications and social services that enable organizations to create communities of interest for their customers. Telligent’s solutions include both external customer and internal employee communities.A customer service community enables you to answer a question once and scale it to an unlimited number of customers.

“Messaging has the potential to replace phone calls—but only if customers know they will get a quick response.” – Joshua March

Message Me: Highlights from the Author Joshua March

Today’s Guest:

Joshua March is the founder and CEO of Conversocial, a leading social customer service solution used by hundreds of the world’s biggest brands to deliver enterprise scale customer service through social media and mobile messaging platforms. Conversocial is an official partner of Twitter and Facebook, and has been recognized by Forrester, Gartner and Ovum as a leading vendor in the social customer care space. Joshua previously founded leading social application company iPlatform, one of the world’s first Facebook Preferred Developers, which was acquired in 2012. A renowned expert in social media and customer service, Joshua has been featured on Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox Business, and the BBC. Having started his career in London, Joshua now lives New York. Message Joshua @joshuamarch.

Josh March on his book Message Me

Conversocial

Since 2011 Conversocial has been in the social care space

Their mission: To bridge gap between rapidly shifting world of social media and the needs of a large entrprise contact center

Landscape: last 2 years: rapid growth of mobile messaging as a social care space

The Book

Discusses this rapid growth and share details about how you deliver large scale customer service through these messaging channels

Shares elements to consider with social customer care

workflow

real time + asynchronous

security and identity

resource agents and manage workflow

manage cases / tickets

manage quality of care

unique elements of messaging means it needs to be managed differently to get the right metrics that are comparable to phone and comparable to chat

Shares the history of social

Illustrates the rise of messaging

Discusses the arrival of automation and AI

Bot platform for Messenger and Twitter caused a bot craze

People built simple, rules-based platforms that yielded lackluster results

But now incredible advancements in AI, machine learning and deep learning

These trends can be joined with messaging to start making a real impact in customer service

This will have a huge, disruptive impact in the social customer care market in the next 3-5 years

Fastest volume growth is customers who have started to promote messaging

“Contact Us” or “Message Me” or “DM Us” buttons on their pages

Promoting out to their customers

Social care at one company was 5% of overall volume before adding buttons, and within 2 weeks that volume shot up to 20% of all of their care volume. Now 25% and still growing

Almost instantly replaced almost half of their email and chat volume and starting to touch phone calls as well

Illustrates a huge, pent-up demand for these channels if you just tell customers about them

All of that growth is directed to private messaging channels

Here’s what held back the growth of social customer care

People didn’t want to promote public care

Inability to fit neatly into a case management made it very challenging to measure in the same way they measure the call center

But Conversocial has spent the past year focusing on changing that so that you can measure:

Sponsored by: Telligent

An Absolute ROI: Customer support communities create a compelling return on invested capital and gives your customers the support options they want.

Decrease support costs: By moving common support cases online, resolutions to cases can be used again and again. Plus you can quickly see which topics cause the most issues.

Plan support staffing: Telligent’s largest customers use their community to plan the staffing of their support centers – communities provide an early warning of incidents that are occurring with products. This type of optimization ensure that they maximize the investment in support.

Self-Service support: Support doesn’t start at your website, but at your customer’s favorite search engine. Every page is page one and the Telligent Community is optimized for SEO. And, people would rather self-service (and help each other) than work through a traditional support team.

About the author, Frankie Saucier

Frankie Saucier created the Socially Supportive podcast because believes that in order to advance digital and social customer care, leaders must come together in a community where colleagues can collaborate on the latest strategies and discuss the best technology. The Socially Supportive podcast creates a space for that community to thrive. She is also the Founder and CEO of Socially Supportive, a digital consultancy that helps brands communicate effectively with customers online. Frankie is a member of several consortiums, including the Social Care Leaders Group, an international group of leaders in the digital and social care space. She has over 20 years' experience in customer experience, including 7 years creating and running the digital customer support team at the 3rd largest cable company in the U.S. She also holds a bachelors in Mass Communications.